Members of the contingent faculty committee wrote recently to the president of Barnard College, both applauding the successful contract with the newly organized UAW Local 2110 (representing contingent faculty) and calling for the rehiring of contingent faculty activist Georgette Fleischer. Our letter was excerpted on the local’s Facebook page. In short, we called for Professor Fleisher’s reappointment and expressed our deep concern about the chilling effect of punishing union activists.

The ongoing campaign to rehire Professor Fleischer has attracted the support of contingent faculty unions, graduate student unions, colleagues near and far, and others. Most recently, the language poet Barrett Watten wrote in support or reappointment, tying Fleischer’s treatment to the increasingly corporate university that diminishes faculty voices and governance.

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Last September, Georgette Fleischer, one of the leaders of a long fight to organize contingent faculty at Barnard College, wrote an article for LAWCHA's LaborOnline detailing the struggle and explaining why the new union, UAW Local 2210, had voted to strike. In June, Dr. Fleischer learned that she had been fired. After 17 years of teaching in the College’s First-Year Foundation programs, she was out.

Welcome to LAWCHA’s blog on contingent faculty and contingent labor! This blog offers an opportunity to share updates, scholarship, opinions, questions, links, and strategies. While the concerns and challenges contingent faculty face will be a main focus of this blog, we hope to engage questions about what the growing presence of adjuncts means for higher

This blog introduces LAWCHA’s newest and most important initiative. Last year, with encouragement from past president Nancy MacLean, an ad hoc committee drafted proposals that the Board of Directors adopted at its April 2016 meeting, most importantly creating the Committee on Contingent Faculty which manages this blog. LAWCHA is now fully committed to fighting precarity